Nick Cave reflects on tragic death of his two sons

Musician said experience of grief helped him feel ‘more connected’ to others

Nick Cave has reflected on the grief he experienced following the deaths of his two sons in 2015 and 2022.

The “Red Right Hand” musician’s son Arthur died in 2015, aged 15, after falling from a cliff near the family’s home in Brighton.

He suffered a fatal brain injury after falling from a cliff onto the overpass of Ovingdean Gap in the area after taking LSD for the first time with a friend. The cause of death was listed as “multiple traumatic injuries due to a fall from a height”.

Cave’s older son Jethro, whom he shared with model Beau Lazenby, died aged 31 in 2022.

Speaking to interviewer Leigh Sales for ABC’s Australian Story, Cave, 66, said that he no longer values art above all else after the death of his two sons.

“That idea that art trounces everything, it just doesn’t apply to me anymore,” he said in a preview clip of the interview.

As the musician began to choke up, he said: “I’m sorry, this is actually quite difficult to talk about.”

Nick Cave told interviewer Leigh Sales that his experience of grief made him feel more connected to others (ABC)

Cave, who has previously said that singing about rage “lost its allure” after the death of his sons, explained that his experience of grief made him feel more connected to others.

“Rather than making me bitter, it did the opposite in some way. It made me much more connected to people in general,” he said. “There is the initial cataclysmic event [where] we eventually rearrange ourselves so that we become creatures of loss as we get older, [and] this is part of our fundamental fabric of what we are as human beings. We are things of loss. This is not a tragic element to our lives but rather a deepening that brings incredible meaning”.

Speaking toThe Guardian earlier this year, Cave said he found the public nature of the tragedy meant he had to confront his grief on a public stage.

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“I was forced to grieve publicly – and that was helpful, weirdly enough,” Cave said. “It stopped me completely shutting the windows and bolting the doors and just living in this dark world.”

In the same interview, Cave said he had been overwhelmed by the messages of love and support he received in the wake of his son Athur’s death.

“I had letter after letter addressed to ‘Nick Cave, Brighton’. It was a really extraordinary thing,” he explained. “And that attention, and sense of community, was extremely helpful to me.”

He continued: “I think people are usually just on their own with these sorts of things. Susie met somebody whose son had died seven years previously and she still hadn’t spoken to her husband about it. These people are utterly alone and maybe full of rage. So I can’t overstate that I’ve been in an extraordinarily privileged position in that respect.”